Ryan Gilland takes to the sky a lot during growing season. His small business, Gilland Ag Services, makes use of his airplane to both spray and plant crops. It's a unique way to help grow crops and is sustainable.
Thomas Capps
Farming row crops from the sky. Hello and welcome to Tennessee Home and Farm Radio. I'm Thomas Capps.
Ryan Gilland
We ended up buying our own ag airplane to kind of start our own operation.
Thomas Capps
It takes all kinds of machinery to row row crops these days, tractors, planters, sprayers and airplanes. In fact, Ryan Gilland from Giles County has built his own ag based business out of using his personal airplane.
Ryan Gilland
We're essentially acting as a small ag retailer, an independent ag retailer we're selling agricultural seed corn, soybeans, kind of in North Alabama and southern Middle Tennessee direct to the farmer. And then we small scale farm and then obviously we do the flying as well. So we've kind of tried to make full circle with it.
Thomas Capps
Gillen isn't just spraying crops with his plane, he's planting with it too.
Ryan Gilland
About 50% of our work that we do is dry work and it'd be either you know, wheat fertilizer or corn fertilize, but we also do a lot of spraying a lot of wheat seed, as well as cover crops. So you're working on soil health, kind of going into the winter trying to hold solar structure together, prevent erosion, that kind of thing.
Thomas Capps
Not only is using the airplane for agriculture, cool, it's also a very sustainable way to farm.
Ryan Gilland
There's been a pretty big push within the last six, eight, 10 years with FSA and NRCS to just kind of help with soil health and mainly erosion. It's helping kind of retain some of the nutrients that we put out in the in the commercial fertilizers and things of that nature to make sure we don't have runoff which obviously we spent a lot of money on these fertilizers that we put out. We don't want those nutrients going into the water source and you know, taking a chance that might be polluting the water source on our stream somewhere. So if we put the cover crops out to kind of draw those nutrients and help hold the soul together, hold them there and then allow it to recycle back into the end of the next growing season. And that's that's what we're really trying to target.
Thomas Capps
A fun job that Gillen has grown to love, and that comes with a heck of a view.
Ryan Gilland
I really enjoy. It gives you a lot of time to think I know a lot of us. Spotify has really been good to us a player so radio in the sky, at least for my use.
Thomas Capps
For Tennessee home and Farm Radio. I'm Thomas Capps.
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